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Most likely this incident is an indirect result of that coup. After that, they had to rapidly replenish the mod team and didn’t have time to vet people, so they ended up with someone like this.
FWIW my recollection from looking over sunbothersco at the time was that they were a clout-seeker with no meaningful history on /r/piracy - they were repeatedly and aggressively asking to be made top mod of a wide variety of subs at the time, with no real connection between them. It sucks that reddit was forcing out top mods, but I wish they’d at least followed through on their threat to make it democracy, since there’s no way we would have ended up with someone like that if the system had been anything but “randomly hand the sub to whoever asks first and loudest.”
Although, as a practical matter it provides some protection in the sense that most malware is probably not designed to do that and will, at worst, fuck up the Windows environment created by Wine / Proton. It’s not something to rely on but it is a bit safer than running something directly on your home machine as a practical matter.
(Although I guess that depends what the malware does. If it searches every document on your system for credit card numbers and sends them to Albania, that would probably still work.)
tbh it’s not really necessary today because there are so many ways to share files. Additionally, the distributed network has major disadvantages:
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No meaningful reputation. If you download software from a file-sharing service you’re taking a huge risk.
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Ease of use. It’s a pain in the ass to new users, which means it doesn’t thrive the way it needs to.
And the advantages aren’t what they once were. There’s so many sites nowadays and it’s so easy to set one up that being resistant to takedowns isn’t worth the trade-off.
I mean, the alternative is Ryujinx, which Nintendo has for some reason ignored for now.
(Ryujinx’s devs are much more cautious about things like banning any references to piracy in their discord and avoiding anything that could look like getting money in exchange for access, both of which may have given them less legal exposure.)
As the article mentions, they’re releasing the Switch successor soon. I suspect the real reason for this push is to try and scare people off from developing an emulator for that one, at least during the lifetime of the console - it’s a bit late to try and kill Switch emulation given that nearly fully-functional emulators already exist.
Near (the creator of BSNES / Higan, as well as a fan-translator who worked on Mother 3 and Bahamut Lagoon) was driven to suicide. It’s a serious issue. And I suspect the sort of people who work on labors of love are often the most susceptible because they’re the sort of people who want to listen and who care if people say something is wrong with their work.
They do occasionally ask for money, but their messaging was always a bit weird.
While I agree their communications could be vague in some respects, I feel like the actual issue was that they were too specific in one way. They’ve been clear for a long time that further donations go to buying games from GOG so they can put them on the site (they were clear that they have enough recurring donations to cover the site itself.) The fact that they do this is why they update so much faster than everyone else, since other sites have to wait for games to appear elsewhere and few people bother to distribute updates outside of major ones.
But I think that this meant that there was a lack of urgency that deterred people from donating. If they just said “give us money if you want us to keep doing this” I suspect people would have donated more.
I wonder what happened, though? Something made them change course over just a few days - as recently as March 11th, they were posting updates on their Mastodon account.
Even weirder, the site now has a link to a changlog, listing games they’ve uploaded but which are not available to anyone except people who were invited.
I think that addition is mostly interesting because it shows the mindset of the site’s owners - they feel bitter and put-upon, like they’ve put a bunch of work into the site and gotten little or nothing back. Maintaining the site must be a lot of work. Not that surprising that they’d decide to go private, I guess.
My understanding is that Ryujinx has been a lot more cautious in general. When TotK was leaked, simply mentioning it in their discord instantly got you the pirate role (which means they won’t give you any sort of support), and continuing to mention it got you a ban. Similarly they crack down hard on even the slightest mention of title keys or the like. They’re very upfront that this is done solely for legal reasons, but they’re also extremely thorough about cracking down on any discussions that could expose them to legal vulnerabilities.
They’re more cautious in a few other ways, too. They have a patreon but you don’t get any newer versions or improved features through it, just cosmetic Discord roles, whereas Yuzu offers the latest releases to Discord subscribers first.
Both of these things (Yuzu devs and moderators openly discussing how to get title keys in its discord, and the fact that they profited off the TotK leak by locking versions updated to support it better behind donations) were specifically mentioned in Nintendo’s lawsuit, so it’s likely that Ryujinx being more cautious around potential legal vulnerabilities is what kept them off of Nintendo’s radar, at least for now.
(Of course, if Nintendo does well enough against Yuzu here they might move on to Ryujinx next - but it makes sense that they’d go after the easier target first.)
I’d disagree when it comes to games. Owning a game on Steam is more valuable than having it on a disk:
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You get updates automatically without having to think about it at all.
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You get cloud sharing, making it easily to share things across different platforms.
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You can play it easily on the Steam deck.
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You always have access to it anywhere you have an internet connection, and are unlikely to lose or damage it.
All of these things can be accomplished with enough dedication by a pirate (except cloud sharing, but you can use SyncThing to accomplish something very similar)… but it’s a lot more time and effort, enough that buying a game on sale is often worthwhile just from a practical standpoint.
I think that Gabe Newell’s statement that “piracy is a service issue” is correct. Steam partially discourages piracy by simply offering a better experience.
Like, yes, in theory, Steam could go out of business tomorrow but in practice the chances of that are much lower than me dropping my disks and breaking them, or losing them, or scratching them, or any of the other risks that come with physical ownership.
Also wasn’t the sub basically taken over by one mod who spends their time working their way into as many moderator positions as possible and then not doing anything with them? Looking at their post history they’ve made like a dozen posts in the last month and one of them was asking to mod another sub.
Yes, I mentioned that - but trusted public sources, who often post on places like Reddit or personal websites run out of the US and the like, can post NFOs but can’t post the actual game. If you knew the correct checksum, you could then turn around and grab the game from an untrusted source.
Distributing the game itself is the dangerous part (in terms of making the copyright pinkertons come after you) so it’s better if it can be done as anonymously as possible, but that conflicts with the need to have it distributed by someone trusted. Putting the checksum in the nfo, which is widely reposted by trusted sources, would help avoid this problem.
Yeah. What I mean is that the Steam Deck itself doesn’t add anything special in that regard to fight piracy.
(Plus, I mean, Steam’s base DRM is like a screen door or a “please do not pirate” sign, lol. If Steam dies one day, Steam DRM won’t be a problem because you can basically crack it by breathing on it too hard. I assume that is purpose is to ensure that you have to violate the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions to pirate their games, not to actually slow down pirates at this point.)
They can be, but at least some of the stuff the Steam Deck does (automated updates, cloud saves, specific tweaks to get it running on its hardware) would be hard to make quite as convenient for pirates for one reason or another.
I mentioned the pirate equivalent to cloud saves, Syncthing - it is absolutely great, not that hard to set up considering what it does, and I absolutely love it and it feels like magic most of the time. But it’s still not quite as easy and reliable as buying the game on Steam and relying on Steam’s servers for cloud saves.
(The fact that it’s hard to make pirated versions reliably update automatically also means that rapid updates are one of the best ways a dev can deter pirates, at least for as long as the game remains supported. I’ve absolutely pirated games that are in early access and then bought them, partially because I liked the game and wanted to support the devs, but mostly because I wanted to get updates immediately and automatically rather than having to wait for it to appear somewhere and then install it myself.)
I know when I set it up I had to add them manually, but that was years ago. Maybe this is a new thing, or maybe your specific Ubuntu instillation was a custom fork of QB that included a bunch from the start.
(I really think it’s unlikely that base QB would include them, since it would make it more obvious that they intend it to be used for piracy - something they’d want to avoid for legal reasons. Yeah, I know, but I’d rather they not get shut down.)
If I recall correctly, CODEX’s Denuvo cracker was Empress anyway, so it has been just her for a long while now. There have been one or two cracks by other people for games using ancient versions of Denuvo that nobody bothered to crack before, but she’s the only one doing anything with Denuvo’s current version.
Yeah, it says that they’re all “well we would have rather do it the other way for your sakes” but the fact is that if they thought they could reliably obtain money this way they’d be doing it already. A ton of legal fees are going to be wasted pursuing people they can’t catch for one reason or another, meaning that their desire to make the pirates pay their costs isn’t going to work as reliably as they’d want.
I think that it’s because now we’re starting to get judges who have an actual understanding of the internet and its issues. In the past, lawyers for copyright holders could make up whatever theories of it they wanted and frame things in whatever way benefits them the most; that’s no longer the case - these judges (including the original trial judge, the appeals judges, and the Canadian Supreme Court, who handed down the original decision at stake here) plainly understand in at least a basic way how the internet is used, what an IP address is, and the complexities of assigning responsibility related to one.
Whereas ten or twenty years ago you would have had judges who mostly depended on the plaintiff’s lawyers for their understanding and who would therefore basically give them anything they asked for.
The only reason people will continue using Unity is because they’ve already made )or are in the process of making) a game using it and switching to something else would waste massive amounts of time and effort. Unity is depending on this - this is basically them squeezing everything out of existing customers without regard for long term growth.
Remember, the whole idea here is that Unity is demanding payments for already existing games. They clearly don’t care about whether people keep using Unity for new games in the future; the executives who made this decision will have cashed out and will be long gone by the time all the existing Unity games in the pipeline are done and things dry up.
The easiest way to figure out where a game is writing its saves is to load it up in Sandboxie and save your game, then check sandboxie’s box content to see what got updated or saved and where.
Also, Cyberpunk is on GOG (because it’s made by the people who run GOG), there’s no need to get it through DODI unless you have a severely restricted internet connection and therefore desperately need the smaller size of a repack - you can get the clean gog installer from gog-games. You should just be able to install the latest GOG version over the old version with no difficulty.
Why was the post on this removed from the Reddit Piracy sub? I find that slightly alarming.
Because the people who tend to care the most about stuff like what Reddit is doing or about having a long-term community moved here; whereas the people who just wanted a quick and easy way to learn how to download warez stayed behind.
I don’t even mean that in a critical way (a lot of us started out like them, and there’s a limit to the number of things people can care about anyway) but that’s more-or-less what it is. The people who came here are the ones who care more about piracy in-and-of itself and who often have ideological or philosophical reasons to support it; and they tend to be the ones who make the most interesting posts.
If it’s not currently a problem then I don’t think we need to ban them. Having to remember a bunch of rules and worry about occasionally tripping one is annoying; and having an occasional stupid meme post isn’t really the end of the world as long as they’re not drowning out useful discussion. If it ever reaches the point where they are then of course things would be different, but that’s not the case right now.
This is a classic Conservative reaction. Not exactly the Donkey/Elephant kind
I mean it kinda is also that kind. If you look at the post histories of the loudest and most aggressive people who oppose the protests, it’s pretty clear they’re right-leaning ultra-capitalist types. Which is not much of a surprise; since the protests are against Reddit’s efforts to aggressively monetize the site, they’re effectively a protest against the effects of capitalism.
It’s also pretty clear that a lot of the loudest and most aggressive anti-protest types are arriving there from links being posted on right-wing forums - you can see this in the lingo and memes they use, which mostly come from that crowd.
That’s not precisely a false positive because they’re not telling you it’s infected with anything.
What they’re saying is just “hey, this is a crack”, which you already knew. As for why they do that:
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Many of these AV solutions are meant to be used in a business environment, where a crack would be unwanted software. (I mean so would any game, but you definitely want to know if someone is dumb enough to be downloading and installing cracked games on a computer meant for business, which puts the company at risk.)
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A lot of cracks - even legitimate ones - do stuff that causes malware algorithms to ping on it (modifying other arbitrary software, or interferes with stuff as it’s being run in an odd manner, or is modified in a way that creates unreachable code and other stuff that a compiler wouldn’t normally produce, say.)
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AV is trained by actual human researchers who investigate files like the above. Most likely when they come across a crack that set off their algorithms they just go “eh it’s a crack, we’re not going to bother investigating it further” and toss it in that bin because realistically pirates aren’t the ones paying their bills.
So it doesn’t mean the software is unsafe, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s safe either, so to speak. It’s “no reading.”
As others have surely said by now, TPB is not safe because they don’t do any sort of moderation (or at least whatever they do is insufficient) leading to it being swarmed with infected software.
If you use it for music or videos or other stuff that can’t realistically be infected with much (and use a VPN, which you obviously want to always do when using a torrent site but especially when using the most prominent and visible torrent site in the entire world) it is technically safe but there are better options.
Although IMHO the megathread should probably mention it somewhere just in a “here’s why you shouldn’t use it” sense - I thought it did? Since it’s so high-profile that users will probably know about it already and need to be warned not to use it for anything executable at the very least.
Nintendo’s real intent is doubtless to try and ensure that nobody ever makes a functional emulator for the upcoming Switch 2.